Mother nature sent her love this Valentines Day with a big snow. For me that meant considering how to move a mile of snow, 2 feet deep and 8 feet wide, when my snow plow motor has died, so that we can drive back and forth to the main road or we will be walking to get in and out. For my dog Blitz, a young lab-beagle mix with boundless energy, it meant porpoise-like leaping to negotiate the deep snow and painfully, testicles rubbed raw and red from getting through that snow all day. Ouch! My poor little man; this was a dog injury I never even considered. The perils of being a small, 19″ tall male dog in a 26″+ snow. Friends with small male dogs take heed; protect those cohones.  Ironically, he was scheduled (for the third time – but that’s another story) to be neutered the day the big snow came in and his appointment was postponed.

Woke up this morning with aching muscles from ramming and shoveling the first 1/2 mile of  the road and now we have a return of the gray-cloudy-snow bearing skies. Had to squint to see it , but yes, it’s snowing again. Thank goodness I have a big strong 14-year old and a new young family next door (that means 1/4 mile) with a big strong dad to help with the shoveling. Drive 20 feet, get stuck, shovel snow, drive, plow, get stuck, shovel again. Over and over for about a 1/2 mile. I’m feeling it today. Plowing is often such a Sisyphean task: plow snow-more snow falls, plow snow – wind blows it right back into drifts, plow snow – more snow falls, plow snow – snow drifts etc. etc. In fact, our first attempt at driving the other day, with plow on 4WD (made functional with some incredible McGyver-like work by Andrew using webbing and old carabiners from my former climbing life), and chains on all four wheels, we made it about 25 feet and that was that.

The next morning you couldn’t even see that 25 feet worth of tracks.

Yesterday, Valentines Day, was the bright sunny clear day I love after a new snow fall, and the first day to go out and see what could be done about digging out. I also took my camera and went for my normal morning walk, made much more challenging by over-the-knee drifts. With all the snow and the drifting from the previous night’s high winds, it was like seeing the trail a new. A whole new landscape that normally is so familiar.

There have been times when big snow not plowed would have caused me great stress. This time, I am much more relaxed, with the zen-like state of the Dude. The Dude abides! (OK, I just shared the joys of The Big Lebowski with Andrew recently so the Dude is on my mind). So what if we’re kind-of snowed in, we have plenty of food, coffee, wine, fresh eggs daily, power that won’t go out even if the grid goes down, satellite internet service, a small library’s worth of books, what more could we need? No problemo. Hakuna matata. Don’t worry, be happy.  Andrew however, seemed to have taken on my former anxiety. He was wound-tight with worries about not getting out. My explanations that we really aren’t stuck, we can always WALK the mile to the main road, we have all we need, along with my Dude-like zen state just wasn’t cutting it for him.

Living on the homestead, a mile back on a private gravel road, puts a different spin on a big snow than my fellow city dwellers. Frankly, I’d rather be here, challenges and all, than trying to negotiate city streets with cars and drivers not suited to snow, but it does mean work. I’m not waiting for the snow plow to come through the neighborhood – I am the snow-plow operator. We don’t have 40 feet of driveway to shovel – we have 1 mile of gravel road, with several steep, switchback sections that are challenging enough to negotiate in fine weather. A friend wrote a funny facebook post in which he calculated the volume of snow he needed to remove from his driveway…920 cubic feet…and then the better idea of heading in for a hot toddy instead. Andrew quickly did his own calculations, determining that we had 84,480 cubic feet of snow between us and the main road. That hot toddy idea is looking mighty fine right now.

So, today we’ll go out and see if anything can be done about the last 1/2 mile of road, walk down (if we can’t drive down) and dig out my car which is always left by the main road when snow and ice hits, see if the paper guy has been able to deliver and find out if the Callaway VDOT guys have cleared the main road yet.  I’ll go see if I can coax the chickens outside today; yesterday they were not having that – no, no, no we won’t go out in the snow. And, I’ll keep on enjoying the snow and practicing my new snow storm zen-like state. The Dude abides!